


Hog Wild

by adiduck (book_people)



Series: Origin Stories [2]
Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Gen, Jaeger Origin Story, Pre-Canon, old fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-04
Updated: 2015-09-04
Packaged: 2018-04-19 00:38:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4726247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/book_people/pseuds/adiduck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Higgs always did enjoy spotting the newbies before the others.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hog Wild

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fic I posted about a year ago on tumblr--the second I wrote in the fandom, I believe. It's a silly look at how Oggie may have been recruited, and it's the companion to the Dimo origin story in the same "series." There was originally supposed to be a Maxim one too, but that... didn't happen. Um. Sorry?
> 
> This and the Dimo origin story are not compliant with any of my other stories or series, and the writing is (I hope) no longer up to my usual standards. This one in particular also makes some assumptions about Higgs that I no longer entirely agree with. Please excuse!

In hindsight, he’d probably seen Ognian from a distance before their first official meeting, but he wasn’t ashamed to admit he’d paid him no mind. He was a jӓger, and at the time Oggie had been a blond human kid on a pig farm on the outskirts of Weissmarkt-uninteresting even to someone who occasionally went undercover as a human. He wasn’t going to be going undercover as the heir to a pig farm this close to Mechanicsburg, after all, that would be silly.

Weissmarkt was a merchant town near a well-traveled pass about 200 kilometers from Mechanicsburg, giving it the distinction of being well positioned for trade but poorly positioned for not being raided. (Mechanicsburg tended to feel vaguely proprietary towards Weissmarkt, actually, in that way that hunters feel vaguely proprietary towards bear traps they set in the woods.) It was ringed by a large number of farms, all of which were founded on the hope that they would be able to sell their wares to the merchants in the town and who stayed due to the grim bloody-mindedness that was bred into the people in the shadow of the Heterodynes’ famous stronghold. Needless to say, the farmers spent a great deal of their time rebuilding.

On the day he met Ognian, the Mechanicsburg army had made a quick stop at Weissmarkt and its surrounding farms to pillage up a few supplies before starting a more extended campaign on the other side of the Balkans. It had gone well, all things considered, almost boringly so, and he had been thinking of stopping by the other generals’ tents and letting them know he was taking some supplies and scouting ahead a bit, get an early start on planning a route. To that end, he’d shifted towards “human” and was wandering through the human camp, observing and trying to get into the right head-space for interacting with oblivious townspeople who he didn’t want to shoot him on sight (the people he was emulating tended to be raiders, pillagers, or brawlers, of course, but at least it meant people tended to be more likely to answer his questions and hustle him out of town quickly)

So he had a front row seat when a young civilian boy walked calm as you please into the center of the Mechanicsburg human encampment, smiling cheerfully and resting what looked like a fence post on his shoulder.

“Hello!” the boy-well, more like a young man, he was about 16 after all-called, catching the attention of everyone within shouting distance of the camp and smiling even brighter at the looks of incredulous surprise. “Hy don’t know if hyu remember me, but hyu came through my family’s farm earlier today und took a few of our pigs. Hy was wondering if hyu still had them, or if they were dead already.”

The jӓger who would in the far-flung future go by “Higgs” blinked and melted into the shadow of a nearby tent. The day had just gotten much more interesting.

The fence post did indeed look vaguely familiar, actually, and he placed it as from a farm a few of Gkika’s boys had raided, returning carrying two or three pigs each and complaining that the farmer had grabbed his entire family and hid in a root cellar, thus taking all enjoyment out of the endeavor. The fence had been painted a cheery blue, and presumably had been demolished by enthusiastic jӓgerkin going straight through it on the way to chow.

While he was determining this, one of the soldiers started laughing and slouched forward, hands in his pockets and teeth on display in something closer to a grimace than a smile. “Hyu pigs are dead,” he told the young man, who hadn’t moved an inch or lost his own smile. “Hyu have no sense of self preservation, do hyu, boy? Hyu gonna pay for comink in here und-” he was cut off when the young man lunged, swinging the fence post with all his might into the soldier’s head.

The soldier went down like a led weight, out like a light and obviously broken nose spewing blood all over his face and the ground. The civilian man returned the fence post to his shoulder and kept grinning. “Well then,” he said pleasantly, as the other soldiers all lunged to their feet, shocked. “Maybe hyu could give me the meat from the pigs, ja? My family could at least sell it at market, hyu know, so we have enough to actually repair all the damage hyu people did this morning.”

“Ve not give hyu _anyting_ ,” howled another soldier, recovering enough to lunge for the boy. “Hyu _brat_ , hy show hyu-“ The boy sidestepped and slammed the fence post into the man’s stomach like a club, then spun it and brought it down on the back of the guy’s head when he doubled over. The grin had gotten a bit feral.

“Ah. Well then, I guess we’ll have to try doing this de less pleasant way.”

Fearless, the jӓger who’d be Higgs thought, grinning and feeling himself shift a bit more jӓgerkin than he’d really intended to be right now. Stupid, too, and reckless-there was no way he’d be able to take on all those men by himself, even if he did have the element of surprise and was—surprisingly holding his own in the mob that had just swarmed him. But fearless. And probably no stranger to violence, if the way he was wielding that post was any indication.

Probably he should wade in, make sure the boy didn’t get his head crushed. After all, he couldn’t join the army if he was dead, and the master would _like_ this one. And unless he missed his guess, the kid would like the master right back.

Hell, _he_ already liked him, and the general flattered himself he’d spotted twenty of the last thirty fledgling jӓgers to join the ranks. This one looked like he would probably be _fast-tracked_.

(He was.)


End file.
